1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to high voltage half-bridge circuits where one end of a load is driven from an output terminal at a junction between lower and upper alternately conducting power transistors that are connected in series across a high voltage DC supply. In its particular aspects, the present invention relates to circuitry for charging a bootstrap capacitor which provides to an upper drive circuit that controls the state of the upper transistor, a bootstrap power supply voltage floating on the voltage at the output terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
Applications of high voltage half-bridge circuits include electronic ballasts for gas discharge lamps, switched mode power supplies, motor drives, and DC to AC converters.
A half-bridge driver circuit of the type mentioned, most of which is accommodated in a high voltage integrated circuit (HVIC), is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,989,127, granted Jan. 29, 1991. This patent is assigned to the same assignee as the present application and is herein incorporated by reference. It discloses the general architecture of the driver circuit as including lower and upper drives for controlling the lower and upper power transistors, respectively. The upper drive comprises CMOS circuitry located in a floating well within the HVIC. Adequate breakdown voltage between this floating CMOS circuitry and the balance of the HVIC is achieved because the design of the well periphery is equivalent to that used to form Lateral Diffused Metal Oxide Semiconductor (LDMOS) transistors. The upper drive is powered by a bootstrap capacitor.
European Patent Application 0 318 110, which corresponds to U.S. Pat. No. 4,908,551, discloses a half-bridge circuit, where, as is now conventional, a bootstrap capacitor powering the upper drive is charged via a diode from a low voltage power supply voltage. The latter low voltage is formed across an off-chip high voltage diode.
In present high voltage integrated circuit half-bridge driver circuits of the type considered herein, both the bootstrap capacitor and the diode via which the bootstrap capacitor is charged are discrete components provided off-chip. This is because the presently needed capacitance value of the bootstrap capacitor, in excess of 50 nf, is too large to be feasibly produced on chip, and the breakdown voltage and peak current capacity needed in the bootstrap capacitor charging diode have also heretofore been thought to be beyond what may feasibly be accommodated with reasonable cost of space in the HVIC.
These discrete components are costly and not as reliable as they would be if incorporated in the HVIC.